Lynn Gilderdale
UK TimesWed, 27 Jan 2010 07:00 UTC
OK guys, I have something really important to say. I want to talk about something extremely private and personal to share with you, my closest friends. After many years of serious deliberation, I have pretty much come to a huge decision. I hope you will try to understand my reasons for this decision and even if you don't personally agree with it I hope you won't judge me too harshly.
I don't know how to begin. I am just going to come out with it. Here goes, deep breaths. Basically I think some of you have known for a while I have had enough of this miserable excuse for a life, of merely semi-existing for the last 16½ years. I have had enough and I want to die. This is no whim and certainly not just because of the reactive depression diagnosed a few months ago. I am no longer on antidepressants because they weren't doing anything for me.
The Times today publishes Lynn Gilderdale's own account of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or ME that she had suffered from since she was 14. Her mother Kay was unanimously cleared by a jury yesterday of attempted murder for assisting 31-year-old Lynn's suicide. Written only a few months before her death, Lynn's description of her determined wish to commit suicide makes for extremely sad reading. It also demonstrates to sceptics that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, once mocked as "yuppie flu", is for some a real and catastrophic disorder.
Comment: Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS), is a disabling condition affecting approximately 500,000 Americans. Research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that fewer than 20% of CFS patients in the United States have even been diagnosed. Patients are usually women in their 40s and 50s, but anyone can develop CFS. Patients with CFS typically have a compromised immune system, elevated blood antibodies, intermittent sore throats, and tender lymph nodes. CFS can affect any part of the body, including the central nervous system, the brain, the blood, muscles, joints, the GI tract, and the immune, digestive, and lymph systems.
For more information, read
Beating and Treating Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by Dr. Rodger Murphree, and visit our forum discussion
Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Would you choose to receive a small amount of money today or a larger sum next month? We know that it is worth it to wait longer for a larger reward, but sometimes the temptation for the smaller, immediate reward becomes too great and we simply cannot resist it. Selecting the immediate reward is known as "future discounting" and often suggests a lack of self-control.
Studies have indicated that there may be a link between blood glucose levels (our body's energy) and thinking. For example, making difficult choices uses up cognitive resources (or brain power) and these resources can be restored by increasing blood glucose.
Psychological scientists X.T. Wang and Robert D. Dvorak from the University of South Dakota investigated how blood glucose levels impact the way we think about present and future rewards. Volunteers answered a series of questions asking if they would prefer to receive a certain amount of money tomorrow or a larger amount of money at a later date.
A team of scientists from The Scripps Research Institute has found that a specific stress hormone, the corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), is key to the development and maintenance of alcohol dependence in animal models. Chemically blocking the stress factor also blocked the signs and symptoms of addiction, suggesting a potentially promising area for future drug development.
The article, the culmination of more than six years of research, will appear in an upcoming print edition of the journal Biological Psychiatry.
"I'm excited about this study," said Associate Professor Marisa Roberto, who led the research. "It represents an important step in understanding how the brain changes when it moves from a normal to an alcohol-dependent state."
Here's a piece of research that might leave you tickled: laughter is a universal language, according to new research. The study, conducted with people from Britain and Namibia, suggests that basic emotions such as amusement, anger, fear and sadness are shared by all humans.
Everybody shares the vast majority of their genetic makeup with each other, meaning that most of our physical characteristics are similar. We all share other attributes, too, such as having complex systems of communication to convey our thoughts, feelings and the intentions of those around us, and we are all able to express a wide range of emotions through language, sounds, facial expressions and posture. However, the way that we communicate is not always the same - for example, people from different cultures may not understand the same words and phrases or body language.
In an attempt to find out if certain emotions are universal, researchers led by Professor Sophie Scott from UCL (University College London) have studied whether the sounds associated with emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise are shared amongst different cultures.
For expectant mothers, catching even a mild case of the flu could stunt brain development in their newborns, according to a new study conducted in rhesus macaques.
Writing in the most recent online edition (Jan. 22) of the journal Biological Psychiatry, a team led by Christopher Coe of the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports that flu infections in pregnant monkeys resulted in significant reductions in gray matter in baby monkeys, particularly in areas that in humans are associated with language, and the combining of information from different senses.
"The effects were greater for gray matter, which reflects cell number and size in the cortex, but we did see some reductions in white matter, too," explains Coe, a UW-Madison professor of psychology and the director of the Harlow Center for Biological Psychology.
In a head-to-head comparison, two popular weight loss methods proved equally effective at helping participants lose significant amounts of weight. But, in a surprising twist, a low-carbohydrate diet proved better at lowering blood pressure than the weight-loss drug orlistat, according to researchers at Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Duke University Medical Center.
The findings send an important message to hypertensive people trying to lose weight, says William S. Yancy, Jr., MD, lead author of the study in the Jan. 25 Archives of Internal Medicine, and an associate professor of medicine at Duke. "If people have high blood pressure and a weight problem, a low-carbohydrate diet might be a better option than a weight loss medication."
Yancy added, "It's important to know you can try a diet instead of medication and get the same weight loss results with fewer costs and potentially fewer side effects."
Even with the best of available treatments, over a third of patients with depression may not achieve a satisfactory antidepressant response. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), a form of targeted electrical stimulation in the brain via implanted electrodes, is now undergoing careful testing to determine whether it could play a role in the treatment of patients who have not sufficiently improved during more traditional forms of treatment.
A major challenge of this work is determining the best region of the brain to stimulate. Some researchers stimulate the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a brain region implicated in depressed mood states, while others stimulate a region called the "anterior limb of the internal capsule," a nerve pathway that passes through the basal ganglia, a lower brain region.
Physicians publishing a new report in Biological Psychiatry now describe findings related to the stimulation of the nucleus accumbens, a brain region the size of a hazelnut associated with reward and motivation that is implicated in processing pleasurable stimuli, sometimes referred to as the "pleasure center" of the brain. The inability to experience pleasure is a key symptom of depression and previous studies have shown that functioning of the nucleus accumbens is impaired in depressed individuals.
Though parents often have concerns about letting their teens use social media Web sites like Facebook and MySpace, a new study by University of Virginia psychologists suggests that well-adapted youth with positive friendships will use these sites to further enhance the positive relationships they already have.
However, they warn, teens who have behavioral problems and difficulty making friends, or who are depressed, may be more inclined to use social media in negative and sometimes aggressive ways, or not to use such sites at all.
The study appears in the January issue of the journal Developmental Psychology.
Mark Brown
WiredTue, 26 Jan 2010 03:00 UTC
© Getty Images
Take a glance at the Facebook groups or poke around prominent internet forums and you'll find plenty of rabid social networkers who want Facebook to lift their limitation of 5,000 friends.
But Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has revealed that human brains are only capable of managing a scant 150 friendships; a number that hasn't changed throughout history, despite our modern fascination with Twitter, blogging and Facebook.
Comment: Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS), is a disabling condition affecting approximately 500,000 Americans. Research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that fewer than 20% of CFS patients in the United States have even been diagnosed. Patients are usually women in their 40s and 50s, but anyone can develop CFS. Patients with CFS typically have a compromised immune system, elevated blood antibodies, intermittent sore throats, and tender lymph nodes. CFS can affect any part of the body, including the central nervous system, the brain, the blood, muscles, joints, the GI tract, and the immune, digestive, and lymph systems.
For more information, read Beating and Treating Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome by Dr. Rodger Murphree, and visit our forum discussion Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.